The Rectifications…of names and things (3) – ‘At the end of the day… the reality is .. the fact is..’

The Rectifications…of names and things (3) – ‘At the end of the day… the reality is .. the fact is..’
Torrey Orton
March 5, 2009

Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation.

These three expressions (‘at the end of the day..’; ’the reality is..’; and, ‘the fact is…’) are, I guess, the most common power moves in everyday conversation. They can be heard in almost every public interview by anyone being pursued for an opinion, or even a feeling, or in explication of their action(s). Their presence in print is somewhat slighter than in speech perhaps. Here’s a taster from Factiva :

The winner, among U.S. media, is: "At the end of the day," which our publications used 10,595 times during the first half of 2006--about 60 times a day.
The newspaper that led the nation in the use of "at the end of the day": Third place, 99 uses: Los Angeles Times
We have a tie for the winner. With 135 uses--three times every four days--the winners are: Washington Post and New York Times.

These guys should know better and maybe, in the 3 years since the data above, they’ve gotten better. Anyway, it’s a linguistic and, consequently, a scientific pandemic.

I leave to you the recollection of the last time you heard or said one of them yourself. They have the creeping infectiousness of flu in a pediatrician’s waiting room. You may not notice you, too, are a purveyor of these ultimate inanities. The fact that they are empty of meaning, because so over-used, means that they are expressing something else than what they would be if they were meaningful. Two feelings and a thought come to mind: certainty and anxiety, addled by conceptual overload.

What’s this look like? You probably can recall conversations something like this: a guy (mostly) who punctuates his contributions, energised by gradually increasing tempo, volume and pitch, with ‘At the end of the day…’ and its siblings. The impact is like that of first hearing atonal music: memorable while at once irritating. Eventually it may be accustomed and enjoyed, if not performed by us. The linguistic variant is memorable and by repetition seeps into our own performances. That’s the channel. I ran into one of these I had shared a meeting with a month ago. He was restrained by the fact that this recent event wasn’t about him or me, so no show stoppers appeared. It was about Victorian firestorm victims.

And that’s what this linguistic trio is – their meaning is closure: no more ideas needed, I’ve got it all under control, conversation stoppers, thought stoppers – mindplugs. It seems to me we are all a bit more careful about what we call the truth. Maybe this word still carries a residue of significance, perhaps one we are hoping for more than that it is so these days. That’s another linguistic mite: the twin set of thou shalt not judge anyone and there is nothing about which we can say ‘it is so’, ‘it is the case that.’ Between the two a cavern of errors and injustices opens up. Of that, more another time.